Pages

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Hillary Clinton mopped the floor with Donald Trump during the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, but it would be dangerous to think this will open up the race for Clinton.

Trump appeared to be doing well for the first 15 minutes of the debate, when he was criticizing American trade policy and talking about job losses as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade pacts that have encouraged manufacturers to move their factories to take advantage of low-wage workers across the southern border and overseas. (Trump, of course, has low-cost foreign workers making ties and other items in his apparel line.)

Then Clinton started to score on Trump, calling his tax plan “Trumped-up trickle down,” which would cut taxes on the wealthy, in a replay of the Bush-Cheney economic policy that sent the US into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. She noted that Trump rooted for the housing collapse because he could make money off it, and he interjected, “That’s called business, by the way.” She noted that Trump said climate change was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, which he denied. Of course, he did tweet on Nov. 6, 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

She also poked Trump about the millions of dollars his dad loaned him to set him up in business. Trump replied that it wasn’t that much. Soon Trump was yelling at Clinton and interrupting her as well as moderator Lester Holt.

About a half hour into the debate, Clinton was wondering what Trump was concealing with his refusal to release his tax returns, Trump was sniffling and rambling, and Republican strategist Frank Luntz tweeted, “Even Trump-leaners agree with Hillary. They want to see his taxes.”

Later, Luntz tweeted, “Hillary Clinton has learned how to bait Trump. He doesn’t know how to not take it. Her attacks work. His defenses don’t.”

As Markos Moulitsas Zúniga noted at DailyKos, “That Luntz tweet is quite remarkable. Luntz is the conservative message guru who gave us ‘death tax,’ ‘job-killing,’ ‘health care rationing’ and ‘job creator.’ And here he is, with one of his focus groups, admitting that Clinton is winning the debate.”

As the debate neared the end, Luntz noted that a Republican friend of his had tweeted, “She just comes across as my bitchy wife/mother.” Luntz replied, “I’m sorry, Congressman, but tonight Hillary is coming across as presidential.” In his focus group, Luntz noted, six people said Trump won and 16 said Clinton. Post-debate polls confirmed that Clinton won by a large margin.

Hillary Clinton has a structural advantage in the presidential race. Trump has alienated women, blacks, Latino and Muslim voters and Nate Silver on Sept. 22 noted that Clinton is leading in exactly the states she needs to win the 270 electoral votes. But that assumes she wins Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the race is currently close enough to vie for the role of “tipping point state.” Senate races in all four of those states add to the drama, and Democrats would gain three of the four seats they need to regain a Senate majority if they sweep those states. If Clinton can win Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio, it would pad her electoral lead and possibly swing at least a couple other Senate seats to the Democratic side.

Clinton cannot afford to lose disgruntled former Bernie Sanders supporters to Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green candidate Jill Stein — nor should she. Johnson is basically a right-wing Republican who wants to legalize marijuana, but Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones.com that among other things Johnson also supports is the Trans-Pacific Partnership and fracking, while he opposes any federal programs to make college more affordable or reduce student debt — in fact, Johnson wants to abolish student loans entirely, and he thinks the Citizens United court decision that relaxed controls on money in politics is great.

Stein is a progressive candidate who has never held elective office higher than her town council and she simply can’t get elected. And Stein isn’t that far left of Clinton after the Democratic nominee adopted 90% of Sanders’ agenda — including raising taxes on the wealthy, with a 65% tax on estates valued at $1 billion or more per couple, up from the current 40% maximim. That would pay for investments in infrastructure and programs to benefit the working class, including financial assistance for college students. Trump wants to cut income taxes, repeal the estate tax and cut aid for college students. Clinton wants to promote solar panels and sustainable energy. Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and loves fossil fuels.

Those are among the reasons Sanders asked his supporters to work for Clinton’s election. “This is not the time for a protest vote, in terms of a presidential campaign,” he said at a Sept. 16 rally in New Paltz, N.Y., for progressive Democratic congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout. “I ran as a third-party candidate. I’m the longest-serving independent in the history of the United States Congress. I know more about third-party politics than anyone else in the Congress, okay? And if people want to run as third-party candidates, God bless them! Run for Congress. Run for governor. Run for state legislature. When we’re talking about president of the United States, in my own personal view, this is not time for a protest vote. This is time to elect Hillary Clinton and then work after the election to mobilize millions of people to make sure she can be the most progressive president she can be.”

One of the hallmarks of Trump’s campaign is his practice of accusing his opponents of abuses that Trump himself has engaged in. While he has accused his opponents of lying, nonpartisan PolitiFact has found his statements to be the most at variance with the facts of any candidate in the Democratic or Republican primaries. Yet Trump insists that Clinton can’t be trusted.

Trump has criticized Hillary Clinton’s activities related to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which Trump said was “the most corrupt enterprise in political history.” But no cases have been uncovered of foundation donors receiving official favors from Mrs. Clinton, and the Clinton foundation spent $242 million in 2014, with about 88% of its budget spent on programs worldwide, CharityWatch reported in April, as it gave the foundation an “A” grade.

In comparison, David Farenthold of the Washington Post reported that Trump, who hasn’t donated to his own Donald J. Trump Foundation since 2008, has used money donated to the foundation to buy a six-foot painting of himself in 2007; sports memorabilia in 2012; and $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013, when Biondi’s office was considering whether to launch an investigation into allegations of fraud by Trump University. Biondi did not pursue the investigation.

Trump also has accused Mrs. Clinton of being a “gun grabber” who would repeal the Second Amendment, when she has called for expanded background checks on all gun buyers to keep weapons out of the hands of domestic abusers, other violent criminals and the severely mentally ill. However, Trump has called for reimposition of “stop and frisk” practices in urban centers, which amount to random police shakedowns of “suspicious-looking” black and brown men in a search for guns and drugs. So Trump actually is the “gun grabber” who wants to set aside civil liberties.

In perhaps the most ominous charge of all, Trump has insisted that the elections will be rigged. Republicans around the country have been enacting rules to suppress working-class and minority voters. Like Bernie Sanders said, this is not the election to cast a protest vote. — JMC

Friday, September 30, 2016

One of the classic motifs of female empowerment movies is
the woman victimized by a man or men who comes back strong, and either makes
herself a success or wreaks vengeance on her former oppressor or both. Think of
She-Devil, the Bridget Jones movies, The First Wives Club, Working Girl, The
Heat, Double Jeopardy, 9 to 5,
Enough, Norma Jean, Legally Blond, Woody Allen’s Celebrity, What’s Love Got to Do With It, Thelma and Louise, and Beauty Shop to name just a few movies
over the past few decades that appropriate the female-victim-to-victory plot in
one way or another.

The journey from victim to victory resonates strongly in
books and movies because it describes the lives of so many women, especially of
the Baby Boom generation, which really was the cutting edge of the various
feminist movements. Successful movies tend to reflect the aspirations, fears
and hopes of the public. Women and men both cheer for the wronged woman as she
puts her life together and blossoms into a successful person, whether or not
she gets her revenge, and whether or not we also like her initial spouse (who
is sometimes a sympathetic roué). And with good reason: most women will know a
woman who has been hurt by a man who cheated on or mistreated her, or will have
experienced it herself.

In the 2016 political campaign version of this movie,
Hillary Clinton plays the heroine. To try to blacken her reputation or bona
fides as a champion for women’s rights by invoking sexual scandals that are now
two decades old is a move bound to backfire. None but the dyed-in-the-polyester
Hillary haters will believe that her actions or comments about Bill’s women were
particularly vicious or anti-woman. Her few nasty comments about some of her
husband’s accusers in fact seem quite restrained compared to what I have heard
my cousins and women friends say about the men who were unfaithful to them.
Men, of course, are much more vehement when cuckolded, but then again, their
vocabulary tends to be saltier than a woman’s, at least outside of the
contemporary spurt of “women behaving badly” films.

The mendacious smear that Hillary was as responsible if not
more so for the alleged mistreatment or harassment of women by our former
President (I write “alleged,” because virtually all of Bill’s peccadillos
appear to have been consensual) is as big a lie as last week’s big lie that Hillary
started the rumor that President Obama was not born in the United States and
Donald Trump ended it.

There are many ways for women (and men) to get extremely
angry at Trumpty-Dumpty and his campaign for dredging up the personal affairs
of his opponent from last century:

Women (and men) will be angry at the hypocrisy of someone
who was twice caught cheating on wives and has been accused of statutory rape
now blaming a woman who was the victim of infidelity.

Women will be angry that he is trying to shift the blame for
the affair from the perpetrator to the victim.

Women will be angry if and when they make the connection
between Trump’s view of women and his excavating of the Clinton’s past: that
Hillary is a less qualified candidate to be president because she couldn’t hang
on to her man.

Women will be angry at the clownish pomposity of Trump
congratulating himself on not bringing up Bill’s philandering at the debate,
even as he was bringing it up.

Women will be angry that he and other Republicans don’t
understand that by staying together and repairing their marriage that the
Clinton’s affirmed the traditional value of marriage so important to most
people, from ultra-conservatives to lefties.

Women will be angry when they contemplate his conflation of
personal matters with professional ones, as in his tweet, “If Hillary Clinton
can't satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” which
is not only scurrilous but also shows only a pre-teen’s understanding of human
nature and what can happen between people.

Women will get angry when they make the natural comparison
of Bill Clinton’s actions and words and Trump’s. Remember that Clinton has
never been caught saying anything disrespectful of women in general or any particular
woman for being a woman—even of his accusers. Maybe it’s because he sincerely
loves and respects women (perhaps a little too much in the past). The length of a list of Trump’s
insults of women for being women is only matched by the list of his
business failures and scandals and only topped by the list of his lies. Among
other sick rationales, Trump has dumped on women for their looks, for their
bathroom habits, for gaining weight, for their speech and for their silence,
for breastfeeding, for imagined changes in professional behavior during
menstruation, for their “manipulation” of men, for growing old and for their
stamina.

Where’s the win here for Trump, except to pander to his core
of support? It’s perhaps the single most stupid gambit ever played in a
political race.

Hillary is handling it in exactly the right way. She won’t
talk about the scandals and she won’t bring up Trump’s personal life. Hillary
rightfully considers Trumpty-Dumpty’s many sexist comments about other women,
such as Alicia Machado, Carly Fiorina, Ghazala Khan and his own daughter, to be
fair and in bounds for a discussion. But her “I won’t go low” approach
regarding the personal lives of her and her opponent is exactly the right
approach.

Meanwhile the many well-respected Clinton surrogates,
including President Obama, Michelle Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,
Joe Biden, Jennifer Granholm and Amy Klobuchar will continue to point out how
deceptive and truly disgusting it is for Trump to blame Hillary for any pain
inflicted by her husband on his paramours or to try to discredit her dedication
to improving the lives of women.

It’s a perfect strategy that needs one more thing. I would
like to see Bill Clinton get real mad and talk into the camera as if it were
Trumpty-Dumpty himself and say, “Condemn me for my past behavior all you want,
but say nothing bad about my beautiful and talented wife
who saw it in her humanity to forgive this sinner and take him back.”

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

I began noticing Donald Trump sniffing about a third of the
way through the debate. He would pause
several times in the middle of a run-on sentence and sniff loudly, kind of like
a seven-year-old explaining that the dog ate his homework or a kid who has just
lost a schoolyard fight. The pace of the sniffing accelerated at about the same
rate as did the deterioration in the logic of his remarks and the frequency
with which he tried to interrupt Hillary, which means it was progressively more
rapid as the debate went on. Others
noticed, too, as thousands of Twitterers wondered whether Trumpty-Dumpty was
sick. Others wondered where the nervous tic came from.

But it was neither illness nor a newly emerging nervous tic.
No, Donald Trump’s constant sniffing was the primal whimper of the bully
backing down, as bullies always back down when their false bravado confronts
someone who emanates true strength.

The sniffing is only the most obvious manifestation of the
beating that Trump took in the first debate between the major party candidates
for President of the United States. Here are some early results:

The first CNN poll had Hillary winning the
debate 62% to 27%, although the CNN pollster did observe that only debate
watchers voted and they tend to skew Democratic.

An early Public Policy Polling survey found 51%
of viewers thought Clinton won, while 40% preferred Trump’s performance.

The MSNBC focus group had Hillary winning 16-4,
while the vote of the CNN focus group was 18-2 in Hillary’s favor.

The consensus of the pundits was that Hillary won the
entirety of the debate. All I saw, except the reality-challenged Hugh Hewitt,
said that the first third was either a draw or a win for Hillary; Hewitt said
Trump won the first third. But virtually every pundit except those identified
as currently working for the Trump campaign concluded that Hillary wiped the
floor with Trump during the last two-thirds of the debate. I share the view of
Chris Matthews—that if it were a baseball game Hillary hit five homers and shut
out Trump.

Matthews was referring to the Clinton zingers, of which
there were several. Her best was when Trump mentioned that he had recently
visited Chicago and Detroit and contrasted it with Clinton not traveling much
this past week. Clinton said, “I prepared for the debate,” paused a bit, then
continued, “and I prepared for the presidency.” The contrast with Trump’s
off-the-cuff incoherence was devastating.

I thought Hillary’s finest moment was when she responded to
Trump’s bragging comment that he was smart not to pay any income tax with: “So if he's
paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or
health.” Hillary then had the good taste to refrain from mentioning that her
family had paid 30% of their income in income taxes.

As an example of what I am calling Trump’s incoherence is
his answer to Lester Holt’s simple question whether he believes in the current
U.S. nuclear weapons policy not to launch a first strike:

“Well,
I have to say that, you know, for what Secretary Clinton was saying about
nuclear with Russia, she’s very cavalier in the way she talks about various
countries. But Russia has been expanding their — they have a much newer
capability than we do. We have not been updating from the new standpoint. I
looked the other night. I was seeing B-52s, they’re old enough that your
father, your grandfather could be flying them. We are not — we are not keeping
up with other countries. I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it.
But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear
alternative happens, it’s over. At the same time, we have to be prepared. I
can’t take anything off the table. Because you look at some of these countries,
you look at North Korea, we’re doing nothing there. China should solve that
problem for us. China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as
it relates to North Korea. And by the way, another one powerful is the worst
deal I think I’ve ever seen negotiated that you started is the Iran deal. Iran
is one of their biggest trading partners. Iran has power over North Korea. And
when they made that horrible deal with Iran, they should have included the fact
that they do something with respect to North Korea. And they should have done
something with respect to Yemen and all these other places. And when asked to
Secretary Kerry, why didn’t you do that? Why didn’t you add other things into
the deal? One of the great giveaways of all time, of all time, including $400
million in cash. Nobody’s ever seen that before. That turned out to be wrong.
It was actually $1.7 billion in cash, obviously, I guess for the hostages. It
certainly looks that way. So you say to yourself, why didn’t they make the
right deal? This is one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history.
The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems. All they have to do is sit
back 10 years, and they don’t have to do much.”

I counted four major lies and about twenty sniffs in that
ramble through ignorance, but could detect no logic in his answer, unless you
think it’s logical to have expected Iran to do something to stop North Korea’s development
of nuclear weapons or that we should support a Chinese invasion of North Korea.
Many people may not know that Russia does not have a newer nuclear capability
than we do or that the money we paid Iran was their money all along that we
have kept in frozen accounts for more than 30 years. But I feel most people
watching saw what a disorganized looney Trump really is.

The battle was mostly fought on Trump’s territory, as he had
constantly to defend his business, his lack of experience and his past statements.
There was only one moment when Hillary was on the defensive—when she quickly
admitted she made a mistake by having a private email server and then moved on
to other matters. Trumpty-Dumpty tried a few other snipes, which Hillary
ignored. The best example, again, was her comment about birtherism. She did not
defend herself from Trump’s obvious and odious lie, but instead defended
President Obama.

Trump tried to interrupt Hillary several times, but she just
kept talking without raising her voice to shout over him, which this viewer
thought was an elegant and classy way to handle the rude Donald. The longer the
debate went, the more he interrupted, usually with short ejaculations, such as
“it’s a lie” when Hillary was factually relating idiocies Trump has uttered in
the past such as his theory that global warming is a hoax created by the
Chinese. Clinton, by contrast, waited respectfully while the Donald spewed
forth his incoherent stew of half-baked ideas and lies before speaking her
piece.

The only thing that Trumpty-Dumpty won was the lying
contest, and that was also a wipeout. Unfortunately for the GOP, it’s a bad
thing, like leading your opponent in turnovers, errors or penalties. For
example, both the National Public Radio
and the New York Times fact-checkers
found a few minor quibbles with Hillary’s statements, but major problems with a
large number of Trump assertions. The biggest two lies were Trumpty-Dumpty’s birther
fantasy and his widely discredited assertion that he was always against the war
in Iraq. But he also lied about the size of the deficit, the effect of the
North American Free Trade Agreement on jobs, Ford moving jobs abroad, the Iran
nuclear agreement and Hillary’s role in creating ISIS, among many other fibs.

BTW, Lester Holt was fine. He wouldn’t let Trump tell either
of his two big lies about birtherism and his opposition to Iraq. He reminded
the audience that “stop and frisk,” a police technique Trump admires, has been
declared unconstitutional. He made sure that both candidates had enough time to
answer his questions, which were all cogent and appropriate. He made it clear
that no matter what anyone else had in mind, he was going to hold both
candidates to the same debating standards.

A big win for Hillary in every way.

The big question is whether her debate performance—and that
of Trumpty Dumpty—will translate into Hillary attracting the votes of
Republicans who recognize Trump’s lack of qualifications, gaining support from
the undecided and poaching the votes of those tentatively committed to one of
the two minor party candidates. We’ll know the answer when the next round of
polls come out. After the contrast between the bright, warm, knowledgeable and honest Hillary and Trump’s mendacious incoherence, if
it turns out that American voters prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton then
the country deserves all the bad economic times and foreign policy difficulties
that will result from his election.

Monday, September 26, 2016

The most recent information coming out about the killing of
Keith Lamont Scott by police officers in Charlotte, which led to days of
demonstrations and a few unruly rioters, makes me wonder whether the officers
involved know North Carolina law.

The police officer who shot Scott have now said that he
first aroused suspicion because he was carrying a gun and a marijuana
cigarette. Let’s take the marijuana first, since smoking marijuana is still
illegal in North Carolina. The cameras tell us the officers were too far away
from Scott to sniff the pot and know for certain Scott was toking it, although
once they were hovering over the dead body they may have seen a joint. So their
defense for considering Scott a person of suspicion rests entirely on seeing a
gun, which in North Carolina should not signal suspicion because North Carolina
is an open carry state, just as is Oklahoma, where the other recent police
shooting of a civilian took place.

Even if it turns out that the officers had a defensible
reason to shoot Scott, it’s painfully obvious that they had no reason to show
an interest in him in the first place. Remember that many concluded the same
thing about the Ferguson shooting: that the police officer really didn’t have a
reason to stop Michael Brown.

Except for the fact that he was a black man.

This focus on the initial stop doesn’t even take into
consideration that the officers manifested two traits common among American
local police: One, their aim is so bad that they only kill and can never just
disable. Two, once they start shooting they can’t seem to stop.

That two police officers would believe that open carry does
not apply to blacks makes a certain twisted sense considering the history of
gun laws. Most people don’t remember that during the late 1960s and early 1970s,
when crime, violence and terrorists acts were at their height in the United
States, many gun control and gun safety laws passed in states and
municipalities. Their major impetus was fear that African-Americans would
follow the drum beat of the violent wing of the Black Panthers and take up
their right to bear arms. Unlike Donald Trump, Richard Nixon made gun control a
major part of his “law and order” campaigns for the presidency and a dog
whistle for keeping guns out of the hands of African-Americans.

Once the National Rifle Association saw the trend of fewer
households owning guns play out year after year, decade after decade, it
started what has now been a 35-year campaign to loosen gun laws. The NRA mostly
has used fear to sell the idea of ending gun control even as violent crime has
continued to drop, but gun fatalities and injuries have not. The result among
other new bad laws has been the preponderance of recent open carry laws passed
by right-wing state legislatures, including the new law in Texas that allows
18-year-old students, away from home for the first time and still not in
control of their emotions, to bring guns onto university campuses.

Open carry laws endanger the entire public, but they place
those African-Americans who want to exercise the same right as whites and carry
a firearm openly in particular danger. I would say that every time an
African-American male carries a gun in public legally he is risking his life.
Given the current police attitudes and statistics about civilian deaths at the
hands of police, this non-lawyer wonders if the open carry laws are in effect a
novel form of Jim Crow: give whites a dangerous and unsafe right that an
African-American with any common sense will not take for fear of being labeled
a predator and therefore subject to open fire by the police.

The NRA, Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent most other
Republicans, have painted a grim world in which we must fear for our lives
because of rampant crime and ceaseless acts of terrorism.

The statistics, so often ignored by the news media in favor
of bloody stories, currying favor with the right or creating false
equivalencies between a competent, experienced presidential candidate and a
high-strung, neurotic ignoramus, paint an entirely different picture: a nation
that has made incredible strides in controlling crime and fighting terrorism,
but still suffers an uncommonly large number of violent non-criminal gun acts
and too many acts of police violence aimed primarily at minorities.

Violent crime, murder, acts of terrorism and deaths from
terrorism are all down substantially from the 1960s and the 1970s, with every
decade, and almost every year, showing declines in all these areas except for
deaths from terrorists in the freak year of 2001.

Deaths of police officers in
the line of duty are also way down, from 576 a year under Reagan to
314 a year under Obama, even as the overall population has increased by more
than a third over that timeframe. Today, in the United States, you have a
greater chance of being killed on the job as a landscaper, mechanic, taxi
driver, farmer, garbage collector and roofer than as a police officer.

Thus, the streets are safer. We have fewer acts of
terrorism. Fewer people are murdered. Fewer bombs exploded in public places. The
police are much safer. It looks as if the system is working.

Unless you’re a minority who encounters police officers.

For obvious reasons, data about deaths of citizens at the
hands of police are hard to come by and sketchy. Few in government until now
have ever cared how many people the police kill each year. But all reports
suggest that even as violent crime, killings of police and acts of terrorism
are down, police shootings and other violent acts by police against civilians are
up. FBI reports set police killings of civilians at their highest in 40 years
in the latest available year. Some sources dispute the FBI’s
statistics, saying they underestimate the true number of people
killed by police officers by as much as 72% (or roughly three times the FBI).

In short, it is safer to be alive now for every American than
at virtually any other time since World War II. Unless you’re
a black male.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.